Understanding is love’s other name. Even without intentional deception, people will surprise you, will shock you, will hurt you, not out of malice, but out of the incompleteness of their own self-knowledge, which continually leads them to surprise themselves.

More often than not, when someone breaks a promise, it is because they believed themselves to be the kind of person who could keep it and found themselves to be a person who could not. If we live long enough and honestly enough, we will all find ourselves in that position eventually, for in the lifelong project of understanding ourselves, we are all reluctant visitors to the dusky and desolate haunts of our own nature, where shadows we do not want to meet dwell. But in any human association that has earned the right use the word love, we must be in relationship with both the light and the shadow in ourselves and each other.

 All authentic relationship is therefore a matter of clear sight  of seeing through the shining pane of the other’s self-concealment and removing the mirror of our own projections.

It is, of course, impossible to ever fully know what it is like to be someone else, this is the cost of consciousness, singular and secretive as it is; impossible, too, to fully convey to another what it is like to be you. The dream of perfectly clear vision is indeed just a dream. But we can always see a little more clearly in order to love a little more purely.

The place of choice is certainly a different one if we think in terms of a world which is compulsively present to the will, and the discernment and exploration of which is a slow business. Moral change and moral achievement are slow; we are not free in the sense of being able suddenly to alter ourselves since we cannot suddenly alter what we can see and ergo what we desire and are compelled by.

In a way, explicit choice seems now less important: less decisive (since much of the “decision” lies elsewhere) and less obviously something to be cultivated. If I attend properly I will have no choices and this is the ultimate condition to be aimed at… Will continually influences belief, for better or worse, and is ideally able to influence it through a sustained attention to reality.

This is so because pure attention reveals the fundamental necessity of our lives, and where there is necessity there is no need for choice, there is only obedience to reality, which is always an exercise of love. Such attention, patient, loving regard, directed upon a person, a thing, a situation  shapes what we believe to be possible and, when coupled with the conscious will, shapes our lives. It is only through obedience to reality that we can ever see clearly enough  ourselves or another to be in loving relationship, by discovering, the real which is the proper object of love.